
Kenya: What Really Happened in Shakahola?
In Kenya's Shakahola Forest, hundreds of followers of preacher Paul Mackenzie starved themselves to death on his promise that fasting would bring them closer to Jesus before the world ended. Reporter Symeon Brown travels to the site and the surrounding communities, interviewing survivors, grieving relatives, and local officials trying to explain how a self-styled pastor built a following willing to endure starvation and, in some cases, watch their own children die. The film reconstructs the pull of Mackenzie's teachings through firsthand testimony, showing how isolation, scripture, and repeated apocalyptic warnings wore down resistance inside the settlement. It sits with the aftermath as much as the events themselves: mass graves being exhumed, a nation asking how mainstream churches allowed such extremism to grow unchecked, and survivors struggling to describe why they stayed as long as they did. Brown keeps returning to the central question the case leaves unresolved, whether Mackenzie knowingly led people to their deaths or whether his own convictions collapsed along with theirs.